mail revisited

[Jack Fowble]

... I am beginning to appreciate the annotations in sendmail.cf's
about xyz-madness, vomiting, etc....

Some time ago I gave up trying to get the mail functions on our
4D70GT to perform properly -- always ended up with uucp-style
destination addresses and error "can't even parse postmaster!"

Recently discovered a new master sendmail.cf for this campus
(anonymous ftp from tut.cis.ohio-state.edu as /pub/sendmail/Tut:sendmail.cf)
that gave new hope, and so launched into it once more.

I now have a sort-of working mail function, with the bad behavior noted
below.

Messages created with /bin/mail always arrive at destination hosts with
header line "Apparently-To: " u at h.d.  This is also true when mail is
invoked with the -t option, and when sendmail is started with -t switch.
(Pretty impressive to see all those redundant "To: " lines!!!)
Messages created with /usr/sbin/Mail arrive with proper "To: " header.

Second, messages created on other systems and delivered via SMTP to
the IRIS are apparently negotiated correctly (sendmail confirms
delivery to the destination u at h.d, but a few seconds later the
mail is bounced back as undeliverable with error msgs
"mail: Options MUST PRECEDE persons"
"554 <"u at h.d">... unknown mailer error 5"
Looks like the sendmail and SMTP components are OK, but the local
delivery by System V mail is cracked.

I tried using the bsd Mail as the designated local mailer,
but all messages got stuffed into /usr/spool/mqueue as 'deferred',
either due to unresolved host.domain or no reason given.
When I remade sendmail.cf to use /bin/mail, then killed and restarted
sendmail, all these deferred msgs were immediately shot back to
the sender with the undeliverable conditions above.

I've checked and implemented the caveats posted in this list before.
Steve Dempsey's caution about avoiding the 'n' flag was a big help.
Others have asked for assists getting this stuff working, but not
much comment ensued on the list.

Questions!!! (sigh...)

Does anyone have this stuff really working well?

I telnet'd into sgi.com (port 25) and saw there a very recently
updated sendmail.cf version indicated in the startup message.  Might
it be possible to ftp a more "robust" version of sendmail.cf from
sgi or other repository?  (Actually, I think the config I'm based on
now is pretty solid -- the problem seems to be in persuading the
local mailer to behave itself.)

Where do I learn the significance of options used in the Argv of
the mailer definitions?  For instance, every local definition has
something like A=mail -d $u, but -d isn't a documented option for
mail!  Similarly, the SGI config has A=mail -s -d $u ; what is -s ?

Has anyone successfully used Mail (/usr/sbin that is... not /usr/bsd)
to support all the local mail functions?  If so, what are the magic
thumbscrews to turn?

My sys_id is presently a simple host name, and sendmail.cf is
set to supply the domain field.  Is it possible that /bin/mail
wants something different/doesn't like this?

In previous discussions here about messed-up implied host aliases
in /etc/hosts, it was suggested that an entry like
    xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx    host.domain   host
was proper.  I wouldn't like to believe it, but could an entry like
    xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx    host          host.domain
(that is, positional reordering of names) cause a problem?

Any assistance would be most appreciated!  I'd really like to get this
monkey off my back (with a happy resolution).  Based on other queries
in the archives (eg. Jim Diamond's ca 8/88), I think others could
benefit as well.